Many parishes in the Anglican Church of Canada are finding themselves torn between their own desire to survive and their obligation to support the higher structures of the church, says Ed Willms, a parishioner at All Saints Anglican Church in Huntsville, Ont.
Willms reached out to the Anglican Journal after reading in its January edition about a presentation on finances at the fall meeting of Council of General Synod (CoGS). At that meeting, CoGS discussed making cuts to national church programs to remain financially sustainable heading into the latter half of the 2020s. Willms wonders whether leaders at those levels are talking about parishes’ situations, and about what they can do to help parishes support them-selves, as much as they talk about diocesan and national funding concerns.
“The national church doesn’t exist without an intent by all these lowly cash-strapped parishioners,” he says.
A frequent topic of conversation in church circles across the country is how to handle the real estate of a church with declining membership. Maintenance and repair projects on churches in Canada—buildings in some cases hundreds of years old—can amount to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Especially for parishes with falling memberships, that can be a heavy burden on top of the costs of heating and building insurance. Many would like to sell, says Willms. But not all can.
Ownership situations of church property differ across the country. In some cases, properties are owned by the diocese, not the parish, and while the parishes are responsible for upkeep, if they sell their building some, most or all of the money from the sale may go to the diocese. Willms says he has seen the way that can paralyze a parish—knowing both that it cannot afford to keep paying to keep its property but also that if it sells (which can be a costly process in itself) it might not be able to apply the money from the sale to its own ministry.
Sometimes, when a parish sells its property, it is able to make a deal with the diocese to use some of the money to push its ministry forward. Graeme Leadbeater, incumbent’s warden at the Anglican Parish of Kokanee in Nelson, B.C., says that was the case in his parish. Kokanee is a multipoint parish which has sold two properties in the past few years for prices between $120,000 and $140,000, he says.
The diocese owned title to the properties, he says, but by making an agreement with the bishop, the parish was able to use the proceeds from those sales to subsidize the cost of hiring a full-time incumbent priest to split time between its remaining sites. “That’s been really the only thing that’s been enabling us to carry on with full-time ministry,” Leadbeater says. Between paying diocesan apportionments, utility operations and building insurance, he adds, the cost of an incumbent would otherwise have been out of reach for Kokanee, as it is for many small parishes.
Other parishes, like St. Michael and All Angels in St. John’s, Nfld., have bumpier experiences. St. Michael’s shut down in 2023, says Hazel Pritchett Harris, former rector’s warden at that church. When the parish’s finances were flagging after the pandemic, she says, it was difficult to get fellow parishioners to recognize what was about to happen.
“I think sometimes the whole idea of not having your church building any longer when you’ve become really attached to it is so appalling that you can’t even think about it for a while,” she says. “But even when we tried to say, ‘Look, this is how dire the situation is becoming,’ several people came up and said ‘Yes, but we’ll be alright,’ which was—I couldn’t say anything. I just said ‘No,’finally. ‘Did you not see the figures?’”
At the time, she says, she had thought the congregation might all worship at another church in the area, possibly using some of the money from the sale to contribute to upkeep of that parish’s building. They also discussed starting some kind of charitable work such as an outreach program to street-involved youth with the money from the sale. But a combination of the surprise with which the congregation seemed to take the closure and the difficulty it had finding a local church at which to convene delayed its planning.
When the building sold and it became clear the diocese would not be making any of the proceeds available, Pritchett Harris says, the congregation ended up scattering, save for a few who still sit together Sundays in the front pews of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.
At the time, she said, she told the bishop it had been a frustrating process. Whether the breakdown in communication was between the diocese and the parish or be-tween the parish committee and the rest of the congregation, it wasn’t clear to her why none of the sale money was available to the parish to pay for a new space, start a new ministry or retain their rector.
Asked by the Journal for details on the decision-making process surrounding the sale, Bishop Sam Rose of the diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador forwarded a pastoral letter he wrote at the time of the parish’s closure in which he expressed, among other things, his sorrow that there was “no option moving forward in continuing to be a parish in the diocese,” but declined to comment further.
The difference between outcomes like the one in Kokanee and that at St. Michael’s is often decided by strategic thinking at the diocesan level, says Canon Grayhame Bowcott, rector of St George’s Church in the parish of the Blue Mountains, Ont.
Bowcott studied closing parishes across the diocese of Huron as part of his D.Min thesis. He says there are some cases where the diocese may choose to reinfuse a struggling parish with resources to hold on to a location it sees as “strategic”—for example, because the church is doing ministry there that the diocese considers especially important. Sometimes, however, the closure of a struggling parish, as painful as it is, is needed for the diocese to plant seeds of new growth.
“I hate to say it, but sometimes a congregation does need to die in order for rebirth to happen because those who have been holding onto leadership are so worn out, they can’t envision a new future,” he says.
Bowcott was not familiar with any of the cases discussed in this story and was commenting in general based on his experience with the closing of parishes.
Usually the step to sell a building and disestablish a congregation comes after a long series of conversations about the location’s viability and options, though these are not always communicated clearly to each parishioner, he says.
In many ways, Bowcott adds, dioceses are making the kind of investment in parishes that Willms would like to see more of, aiming to prop up the church’s presence where it can do the most good, sometimes at the cost of pulling resources from somewhere else. “And so the strategic plans, the actions that are carried out on behalf of local congregations by the leadership team of the diocese, sometimes that’s not communicated and creates that ‘us vs. them’ culture,” he says. “But generally my experience with bishops is they are scaling everything back at a level that directly relates to giving at the local congregational level.”
One way to prop up parishes that are facing eventual dissolution, Bowcott offers, would be for dioceses and the national church to encourage parishes to look at what they might do to break out of their existing patterns. In a time when the prevailing narrative is decline, the parishes that manage to turn that around are often those that try several new approaches to ministry or outreach and find one that fits their local needs. In his opinion, the best investment the church’s larger structures can make in parishes is to connect them to the resources to study what has worked elsewhere and how they might apply it to improve their own vitality.
